The Lord (Continued)

Since the Father is in the Lord and the Father and the Lord are one, and since we are to believe in the Lord and whoever believes in him has eternal life, we can see that the Lord is God. The Word tells us that the Lord is God, as in John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, and nothing that was made came about without him. And the Word became flesh and lived among us; and we saw his glory, glory like that of the only-begotten child of the Father. (John 1:1, 3, 14)

In Isaiah:

A Child has been born to us; a Son has been given to us. Leadership will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called God, Hero, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)

Again:

A virgin will conceive and give birth, and the [child’s] name will be called “God with us.” (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23)

And in Jeremiah:

Behold, the days are coming when I will raise up for David a righteous branch who will rule as king, and prosper. And this is his name: they will call him “Jehovah our Righteousness.” (Jeremiah 23:5, 6; 33:15, 16)

Everyone in the church who receives light from heaven sees divinity in the Lord, but people who do not receive light from heaven see only humanness in the Lord. Yet the divinity and the humanity in him are so united that they are one, as he also tells us in another place in John:

Father, all that is mine is yours, and all that is yours is mine. (John 17:10)

The church knows that the Lord was conceived by Jehovah the Father and was therefore God from his conception. It also knows that he rose with his whole body, since he left nothing in the tomb. He assured his disciples of this later when he said, “See my hands and my feet—that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). And yet even though he was human in having flesh and bones, he entered through closed doors and vanished after he had revealed himself (John 20:19, 26; Luke 24:31).

It is different for everyone else. We rise again only in our spirits, not in our bodies, so when he said that he was not like a spirit, he was saying that he was not like anyone else.

We can see from this that even the human part of the Lord is divine.

We all get from our fathers the reality underlying our life that is called our soul. The manifestation of life from that underlying reality is what is called the body. So the body is an image of its soul, since the soul carries on its life through its body at will. That is why we are born looking like our parents and why we can tell families apart. We can see from this what the body or the human nature of the Lord was like—it was like the Divine itself that was the reality underlying his life, that is, like the soul from the Father. That is why he said, “Those who see me see the Father” (John 14:9).

According to the statement of faith accepted throughout the whole Christian world, the divinity and the humanity of the Lord together make one person. That statement reads as follows:

Although Christ is God and a human being, yet he is not two, but one Christ. Indeed, he is one altogether, one person. Therefore as the body and the soul are one human being, so God and a human being are one Christ.